Super Mario World (SNES Review)

Super Mario World
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 21, 1990 (JP) August 23, 1991 (US)
Directed by Takashi Tezuka
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing on Mario Wiki

Is Mario pointing at what to eat or is he slapping the side of Yoshi’s head? Because if it’s a slap, and since all dinosaurs are birds, is this just the first step towards preparing a meal of foie gras?

Gosh, uh, this is awkward. Because when I reviewed Super Mario 3 last week, I said that Super Mario World was the gourmet meal to Mario 3’s bag of highly addictive potato chips. Now that I just played through Super Mario World using the same rules as the other games in my Super Mario 40th Anniversary Marathon where I have to play through every level without using any items to bypass the action (see my reviews for Super Mario Deluxe, Lost Levels, Doki Doki Panic, and Super Mario Advance), I really thought I would enjoy Mario World’s level design the most of any “traditional” Mario game. Super Mario 2/Doki Doki’s level design is hard to top, but that’s a totally different style of game. I thought Mario World was the peak of “pure Mario” design and I would have the time of my life studying it. Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I was bored playing Mario World, either. It’s awesome. One of the best 2D platformers ever made, easily. Even needing to immediately replay some levels so I could score a 100% didn’t bother me at all. But the massive upgrade over Super Mario 3 that I remembered never showed up. What just happened?

Remember kids: pick the middle file or they win.

For years now, I’ve always held World up as the benchmark of platforming mechanics. THAT I’ll still stand by that. Super Mario World has the most intuitive jumping physics of ANY Super Mario game, 2D or 3D. It’s so intuitive that you can launch yourself off Yoshi, fly through the air and hit a question mark, and then stick the landing on Yoshi’s back without even needing to really think about it. It becomes second nature in record time. Okay, so the cape takes practice, but it also offers a lot more versatility than the raccoon tail. It can also be used to bypass large sections of the game. More on that later. But the point is that Mario World is the most polished 2D playground that ever existed up to this point. You’re provided the tools to make the controller vanish in your hand. You can tell that Nintendo realized they had to make the best controlling platformer ever in order to make sure players adapted to the new six-button SNES controller, and they nailed it. The controls are perfect.

Like Mario 3, I found the bosses overall to be weak. Before the Bowser fight, I guess I liked the Reznors the most. It’s really not that different in the way you fight it than, say, dealing with Hammer Bros. in any other Mario game. But it’s staged differently and it works. The first time, at least, but then an identical fight happens three more times and the thrill is lost.

The levels are less than perfect. Oh, they’re certainly better than Mario 3’s. Most of the seventy-three full-sized stages are bigger in scope and scale than anything in Mario 3. They also better incentivize exploration. On the map screen, you’ll notice that normal levels have yellow and red dots. Stages with red dots have two exits, and acing the game requires you to not simply beat every stage but find every alternative exit. But, only a little over a third of the levels actually utilize that, and if you miss an exit, the game doesn’t tell you. After I thought I had everything, I played the second form of the Bowser stage, won the fight, and then reset the game after the credits to find out I had 93 out of 96. I found two exits I was missing, which got me up to 95, but then I was stumped. It was actually Star Road 3, which can be beaten in about three seconds. I just never crossed the tape on it. But I had to figure that out on my own. It didn’t indicate which levels I’d found everything on.

The haunted ship feels like a missed opportunity. It’s just an underwater ghost house that doesn’t utilize the maze concept as well as it should. Simply swimming around enemies isn’t as exciting to me.

The actual gameplay is also a clear upgrade over Mario 3. Okay, so I don’t think the cast of enemies is quite as memorable as Mario 3’s. The dinosaur-themed basic enemies just don’t feel very Mario-like. Even though the Adventure Island games don’t really use evil dinosaurs, the dino-cast part of Mario World’s roster feels like it would be more at home there. On the other hand, Mario World’s non-enemy obstacles are stellar. It has a much wider variety of indestructible hazards, and with the new spinning jump, you might even be able to use them to your advantage. Like in this level:

You could play it safe, like I did this time. Or you can throw caution to the wind, take a deep breath, and do a running spin jump and try to bounce across them and hope like hell you’ll eventually reach land, and it’s exhilarating. Or you can use Yoshi to do it since Yoshi’s feet are immune. Speaking of Yoshi, this was his debut game and he’s a lot of fun to use. He also adds an interesting risk-reward dynamic to the exploration. It’s tougher to explore with Yoshi. You can’t climb vines with him. You can’t use the cape’s parachuting mechanic with him. That’s one of the biggest differences between Mario 3 and this game: there’s a lot more consideration for tempting the player to choose the wrong thing. Instead of the game funneling you by providing you with the exact right tools you need, it might do something like offer you a fire flower when you really need the cape. There’s small hints of this in Mario 3, but it happens constantly in Mario World, and I love it for it.

YOU ARE A SUPER……. OVALTINE DRINKER?! Son of a bitch!

So why didn’t I have as good a time as I thought I would? Maybe Mario World is just a one-and-done experience, and I’ve done it before. Unlike Mario 3, I remembered where almost everything was. Even if I didn’t remember the specific locations of keys or the solutions to the Ghost Houses, I remembered enough to have a general idea of what I was supposed to do. Worst case was I mixed up the solution for one ghost house with another, which I did a couple times. Otherwise, I apparently didn’t forget anything about Mario World. Okay, well, how much difference could THAT make? After all, Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 3 offered me no surprises either. Well, except for one key element: challenge. Mario World didn’t. I died four times this entire play session, and two of them were in the “Special Zone” area. All but one death was the result of mistimed jumps. I even stuck to the rule of playing the levels instead of bypassing them with the cape, and I just utterly shredded Mario World. It’s too damn easy. I had the max 99 lives before I even got out of the third world.

You know the bonus stage that you get for breaking the tape, pictured above? After a while, curiosity got the better of me and I tried to see if I could not win any lives playing it. I needed eleven total cracks at it before I finally did it. Twice I got one life, and every other time I deliberately tried to lose, I got two or more. I couldn’t even lose a mini game on purpose. Yeesh.

I think the reserve items were a bad idea in general. But, I also think the cape is too powerful and allows you to cheese stages too easily. Mario 3 had a similar problem with the raccoon tail, and while I noticed Mario World did a better job of limiting places you can build-up a running start, if I had wanted to I could have easily skipped several sections. It got me wondering if flying is a good idea at all in Mario games. If you’re going to do it, the way Super Mario 64 did it seems like the best way to handle it. Instead of the flying cap being a permanent upgrade, you have a time limit to accomplish what needs to be done. It seems like work, because I had very few “cheer out loud” moments with the 2D flying sequences, but plenty with the cap in the 3D game.

It’s no coincidence that the most exciting flying sections in the game, at least for me, used the balloon, which has a strict time limit.

Mostly, I think it’s because Mario World is more of an experience than a game. As colorful and interesting as Mario World is to just gawk at, you just have too big an advantage over it even if you force yourself into the thick of battle, especially if you know what’s coming. So this leaves me in a weird position where my gut still tells me that Super Mario World is the better game because of the more elegant level design and historically great play mechanics, BUT, it still wasn’t the game I enjoyed the most during this marathon. That still belongs to Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, and not just for the eReader levels, either. Subtract those and I still give the slight edge to Mario 3 based on the fact that I couldn’t just sleepwalk my way through it. I might have had more fun playing Mario World over Mario 3 in 2003, but in 2025, my replay of Mario 3 required me to actually focus and think about what I was doing. It’s something I just learned: challenge matters more the second time than the first. It’s the real replay value.

The one and only boss in the game that ticks all the boxes (except maybe challenge) is the Bowser fight. Mario World has TERRIBLE boss fights, right up until the finale, where Bowser has a memorable design and a fun way of attacking him. Each of the six shots you need to land on him feel great. If you ignore “the weird one” in Mario 2, this is the first truly great Mario boss.

I had the same problem with Shadow of the Colossus once, too. The second time I played through it, even though it was as good as I remembered, it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, either. Maybe that’s the paradox of historically great games. Once a game reaches the status of “unforgettable” in the literal sense, it actually becomes harder to hold up to replaying. That’s because all that’s left is the base challenge the game has. So while Mario World is truly excellent the first time around, it’s never going to come close to being as enjoyable because too much of it is based around the sense of discovery or other surprises. Besides the cheesable stuff with the cape, it doesn’t even really lend itself to the type of scrutiny that comes with reevaluation because Super Mario World is so damn awesome that it’s almost boring to reevaluate. Almost.

I still loved the “find key and insert it into keyhole” bit but that was quite muffled by the fact that most of the keys are right next to the hole. This feels like Mario World’s biggest missed opportunity to crank-up the difficulty. Just place the keys further away from the holes.

Again, I had fun yesterday. It’s hard not to when the controls are this perfect and the gameplay is as fine-tuned as you see here. I just didn’t have as much fun as I expected. So I can take the glass half-empty approach and say that Mario World has too many slow and dull auto-scrolling levels and not as strong of a basic enemy roster as Mario 3 so I may have overrated it before. Or I can take the glass half-full approach and say that Super Mario World is so well made that it’s perfect your first time playing and doesn’t lend itself to fun retrospective looks. I’ll go with Option B because that way it’s not my fault I didn’t have as much fun as I wanted.
Verdict: YES!